


it's a wise father who knows his own child

by rain_sleet_snow



Series: classified? i know all about that [5]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Amnesia, Child Soldiers, Dubious Consent, Dubious Ethics, Extremely Dubious Consent, F/M, Freedom, Implied/Referenced Brainwashing, Knights of Ren - Freeform, Post-Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Power Imbalance, The Dark Side of the Force, The Force, rated for themes only: not graphic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-05
Updated: 2018-08-05
Packaged: 2019-06-22 09:49:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15579216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: Rey gets three things from her father: her freedom, her Force-sensitivity, and the colour of her eyes. From her mother, she gets only her life.Please read the tags.





	it's a wise father who knows his own child

**Author's Note:**

> Written for incognitajones, who said she liked the idea of Rey being the abandoned child of someone from the First Order. Consequently, horribly messed up. 
> 
> Thanks to Incognita and Brynn for taking a look at it.

There was never a time when he didn’t know where this was going. He’d known the day she caught him watching and stared back at him a little harder; he’d known the day she invited him into her bed, and the next day, and the next.

 

(It never occurred to him to wonder what would happen if he said no. Troopers didn’t. Not to officers, and especially not to officers like her.)

 

There were moments of temporary delusion along the way, whole seconds and minutes and hours when he was convinced he wasn’t just a means to whichever end she’d cooked up now. Moments when she complimented his professional skill; seconds when they smiled at each after a battle, blood on her teeth, blood on his armour; minutes when she relaxed in his arms, hours when she allowed herself to sleep in his presence.

 

All of those moments felt warm in a way he wasn’t used to, a way he only dimly remembered from the earliest days of his childhood, many long years before Brendol Hux had taken a hundred brilliant children and teenagers with bloodlust in their veins and turned them into stormtroopers - proofs of concept, to lead those who would come after them. He held those moments close, closer than the name he’d almost forgotten, and he would have done anything for more of them, felt sick for lack of them when she wasn’t there, came at her call when she crooked a careless finger because that warmth might be waiting for him.

 

Some of the officers laughed, though at him, not at her; they were all too afraid of her. The younger troopers didn’t, because he could have killed any of them without breaking a sweat.

 

Phasma took off her helmet and looked him in the eye, jaw set and face hard.

 

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Phasma said.

 

“I don’t have a fucking clue,” he replied.

 

 

 

She left for a year: political manoeuvres in the mid-Rim. He almost got used to the wound that was her absence.

 

When she came back, she moved slightly differently, but - like she was self-conscious about it. He wondered why. He didn’t wonder why hard enough to worry when she summoned him.

 

“Of course you’re going,” Phasma said, sighting down the barrel of a blaster she was cleaning.

 

“Of course,” he repeated.

 

“You don’t have a choice,” Phasma said.

 

He didn’t reply before he left the barracks.

 

 

 

She didn’t want to kiss him or to touch him. She just showed him an image; a small, pink-faced newborn, swaddled up in white, sleeping.

 

“Yours,” she observed.

 

“I didn’t know that was possible,” he said, truthfully, heart beating like a spasming hyperdrive. “I didn’t think -”

 

They didn’t even have names unless they earned them, like Phasma, fifty percent of whose organs were not the originals. He’d assumed everything else was forbidden to them too, right down to procreation. He didn’t know what half of the medications he was given were, and he was sure he wasn’t aware of everything he was given.

 

“I didn’t either,” she said coolly, “obviously. I was certain I was past it. Otherwise I would have realised in time to end the entire farce.” She laid the image down, out of his reach. “Still, it is possible the child will grow to be something worthy of the trouble. One day I may have a use for an heir.”

 

He said nothing.

 

She didn’t take her eyes off him. “Steps will be taken, to avoid future mishaps.”

 

He nodded. There was nothing else he could do.

 

 

There was no rule against going to the nursery. It was expected for him to inspect the cadets, and no-one noticed him passing through the nursery on his way out. No-one was looking.

 

He recognised his daughter. She looked like every other baby in there, that same half-formed look, but she was his, and he knew her.

 

He touched her fist, and she curled her tiny fingers around his, and a supernova filled his ribcage.

  


He chose a name for her. It wasn’t allowed. She’d had a number from the day she was placed in the creche, which (he understood from her mother) was the same day she’d been born. Any name she earned - and her mother, if she said anything about the baby at all, assumed that she would make a fine trooper, one worthy of a name - would be given to her later. But he stood on the red soil of a planet with four suns and listened to Phasma be sarcastic about a contact.

 

_He’s just a ray of sunshine, isn’t he?_

 

Sunshine was too long. Sun wasn’t right. Looking at the fingers of light pouring down through the clouds, picking out low buildings in the distance, he liked the sound of ray.

 

He spelled it out as best he could in the dust with one boot, then smudged it into nothing to be safe.

 

R E Y.

 

It was difficult remembering how to form the letters. He couldn’t even remember when he’d been taught.

 

The First Order had a way of stealing your memories away, so that nothing really stuck, afterwards, except white armour and red banners and your orders.

 

He kept going to her when she summoned him. It didn’t really make him feel warm any more, not the way watching Rey crawl and walk with the rest of the cadets did, not the way her bright eyes or straight shoulders did. But he kept going, and never even thought about trying to say no.

 

“You pay a lot of attention to the cadets,” she said, sitting back on her bed in undershirt and grey uniform trousers. The heavy silver streaks in her hair glinted in the low light.

 

“I get exceptional results as a trainer,” he replied, danger prickling along the back of his neck.

 

“You excel,” she agreed, and ordered him to take off his armour. She didn’t say anything more about it.

 

 

 

He knew all about the Knights of Ren. All of the remaining thirty-four of Brendol Hux’s original hundred did. That was why they were still alive.

 

 _Nu kyr'adyc, shi taab'echaaj'la_ , said one of the thirty-four, who had a name and never used it, and none of them said anything in reply, though they all knew what she meant. _Not gone, merely marching far away._ It seemed ironic to him - he’d seen the Knights play with his comrades; heard their screams; knew exactly where they had gone and had made certain a few of them died quickly - and more than that, it seemed foolish.

 

It was one thing to emulate the military spirit and efficiency of the clonetroopers their students and subordinates called the Eldest Brothers. But to join those clonetroopers by being different in any way from the pattern set out for them, to speak anything other than Basic -

 

He had Rey to worry about, he wasn’t going to draw attention to himself, and besides that he was not at all surprised when the Mando’a speaker was tapped to provide escort duty to Lord Ren himself.

 

She said yes, of course. Not that anyone was checking to hear whether she did or not.

 

“Are you worried?” Phasma said.

 

All the troopers always asked him that. The officers - including his officer - joked that they should call him something that meant coward. They didn’t realise that he always knew when something was about to go wrong; always knew when death was about to lay a cruel or wise hand on the shoulder of one of his troopers.

 

“Always,” he replied.

 

He nearly passed out when his officer told him that the Knights of Ren had come to inspect the creche; hoping to grow some of their own ranks, since the trooper student model had proven so effective, and since it was difficult to get access to other large groups of children to determine their Force-sensitivity.

 

“I’m not sure the same practices will work on sorcerors,” she said dispassionately, her mismatched red and blue eyes resting on him as she watched him catch his balance and finish dressing. “And the knights, as we both know, are not patient enough to cope with mistakes; children always make mistakes. I’ll be amazed if any of their choices survive. But either way it’s a credit to your work with the cadets.”

 

“Thank you,” he said, as colourlessly as a good trooper should.

 

Maybe too colourlessly. On his way out he heard her say softly, mockingly: “Perhaps we should call you Professor.”

 

He wasn’t meant to laugh. He just nodded instead.

 

The plan fell together better than he could have dreamed of. He’d put together several quiet ideas before, in the privacy of his own mind, knowing all the time that there would probably never come a moment when he was desperate enough to use them. He was desperate enough now.

 

Rey was three, and he had personally seen her levitate small objects and sneak food from her yearmates, and sometimes he felt her touch his mind, small and curious and bright.

 

And fragile. So fragile.

 

He opened his mind to the second sense that told him when to be scared, lifted his blaster and his daughter, and followed where his senses led. Rey clung close to him and trusted him better than he had dared to hope, and for a while, it worked.

 

Freedom, it turned out, tasted like being afraid all the time; but maybe that was just because he wasn’t used to it, and maybe Rey would grow up knowing what it felt like and taking it for granted, like the cadets who knew too much to flinch at the sound of exploding mortars.

 

Taking the job that led to Jakku was his first false step, though, and once he’d made one it seemed as if they followed on, one after the other, like an avalanche creaking to life.

 

 _Hide_ , he told Rey, when it became clear he was out of other options, _hide, hide, hide_ , and fought with all his heart to believe that Rey was not his daughter at all, just another servant of Unkar Plutt’s with too-small hands and too-bright eyes, and went out to face his death so that it wouldn’t be Rey’s. He wasn’t armed; that would make it all the faster.

 

 _Not real_ , he thought, _not real, not real, I don’t have a daughter, she’s dead, she’s gone, there’s nothing here, it’s all gone_ , and when he saw Phasma - still distinctive in her stance, in the way she held her head, her body language as good as a nametag to someone who’d been raised alongside her - he assumed he was about to be shot, and would be able to stop fighting soon.

 

“Lord Ren wants to see you,” she said, and that was the last thing he knew before the butt of another trooper’s rifle crashed into his skull.

 

Lord Ren had very brown eyes and a mind like razor blades. It savoured every drop of blood that seeped from his.

 

“The girl is dead,” Lord Ren announced to Brendol Hux and to his officer, lip curling under the brim of her grey uniform hat. “He’s quite frantic over it.”

 

“He was always sentimental,” his officer said coldly.

 

“We all have our failings,” Brendol Hux said, oily.

 

“If that’s a reference to my service record,” his officer snapped.

 

“Relax, Isard,” Brendol Hux sighed, lazy and bored. “Your integrity as an officer is not in question. We all know you gave the brat up. Pity her father was less wise. It seems she could have made more than a trooper.” Hux sat back in his chair. “What do you think? Decommission or recondition?”

 

Kylo Ren’s lightsaber snapped into life; he could feel its heat at the side of his neck.

 

“Depends,” his officer said coolly. “How much do you need a trainer?”

 

“Lady Tamé killed off another one for incompetence last week,” Brendol Hux admitted. “She was perfectly right, but really, they aren’t easy to replace. So perhaps a spare wouldn’t go amiss.”

 

“Well, then,” his officer yawned, and pointed the toe of one highly polished boot at his face. “Keep him. Unless your boredom can only be satiated by beheading, Lord Ren?”

  
  
“It would be a waste of my time,” Lord Ren said coldly.

  
The lightsaber turned off, but he could still feel the burn.

 

He didn’t know what reconditioning consisted of exactly: only that troopers subjected to it came back different, strange, without the memories they’d had before. If that was so he wouldn’t remember Rey, and she would be safe.

 

The operating chamber they left him in was very white and very bright, and for a few precious moments he was alone, and the blood-on-the-tongue taste of the Knights of Ren was far away. Reconditioning bored them, he knew. Not enough blood or screaming.

 

“I love you, sweetheart,” he said, thinking of Rey’s wide hazel eyes just like his own, and held on tightly to the memory of the supernova in his ribcage when she’d first held his hand, until that, too, was taken from him.

 

AA-0023 returned to duty from reconditioning on the precise timeline expected, and was given his new orders and told to report to the cadets’ wing. He went, and was surprised when Captain Phasma stopped him briefly in the corridor, her armour brightly polished with chromium (and that was somehow new, but he couldn’t think why; he wasn’t acquainted with Captain Phasma). She stared at him very hard.

 

“Ma’am,” he said, coming to attention.

 

“Dismissed,” she said.

 

He must have imagined the faint note of disappointment in her voice.

 

 

(Rey is rescuing Finn, for the hundredth time. No, that’s not fair, they’ve stopped counting. She finds her way through the vents that Rose described to her, charting a path to the prisoner bay of this backwater brig. She tumbles out a grille at the other side, and finds a stormtrooper looking at her. Just the one. Long-serving, by the look of his armour, and his rifle slack. Maybe he wasn’t expecting an intruder.

 

Maybe it’s not just that, some instinct tells Rey, charting the way the trooper’s grip tightened on his blaster and then loosened again, deliberately, but she hisses at it to shut up so she can concentrate. She knows what she should do now. Kill the trooper to stop him raising the alarm, use his bioscans to evade suspicion -

 

She doesn’t.

 

She raises a hand and tells him to sleep, and she even catches him when he crumples to one side, lays him out gently on the floor.

 

She hasn’t taken his helmet off. She’s got the funniest feeling that he’s somehow smiling.)


End file.
